


solace

by mutterandmumble



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Character Study, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Memory Loss, No Dialogue, Pre-Relationship, Spoilers, Stream of Consciousness, Takes place between seasons, The Umbrella Academy (TV) Season 2 Spoilers, Unresolved Romantic Tension, prose poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:47:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25760845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble
Summary: In this iteration of the world, time stands stillOr: Vanya, early on
Relationships: Vanya Hargreeves/Sissy
Comments: 24
Kudos: 106





	solace

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: includes a graphic description of the accident at the beginning of the season where Vanya is hit by a car. Also includes hospitals and mild language and canon-compliant memory loss 
> 
> This fic… doesn’t make sense. I had fun but there’s a lot going on here. I’ve been in a bit of a weird place lately for a number of reasons, and that usually means a fallback onto prose poetry for me so I figured I may as well get ahead of the game. I was also super excited about vanya getting the girlfriend she deserves!! good for her, good for her. Anyways I had a lot of fun with this! I hope you enjoy!

Vanya blinks into existence in a dingy alleyway on the side streets of Dallas, Texas, full-blown and revved up and ready to make an entrance that has all the drama that she deserves; there are bright flashing lights and electricity that crackles and sizzles and wriggles inside her, and there are billows of smoke and the shriek of violins and the shine of her eyes like a beacon in the dark. She’s so pale she may as well be dead, dressed to the nines and very fit for company, so she sweeps onto the sidewalk in all of her glory, and then she strides into the street (to wreak some havoc she’s sure) and then she’s hit by a car. 

That puts an end to things. There goes the electricity, the smoke, the eyes like the moon. In their place comes pain like she’s never known, or maybe that she  _ has  _ known and just can’t recall because she just got hit by a _car_ , and that’s sort of taking up most of her attention at the moment. A burst of white sparks crackle behind her eyes and she feels like she’s on fire, through and through and through, like she’s gone and used her frail stick-bones as kindling, and her head’s gone dark (all the lights are off) but the sun is yellow-gold and butter-smooth and very bright where it hangs in the hardened shell of a sky, so she’s at least able to see. But as she keeps looking, as she pieces together what little she can process through the wavering heat of the late afternoon, she comes to the blinding realization that she’s missed something vital somewhere because the sun’s not really the sun at all but rather a woman. 

Vanya’s cheek is pressed into the asphalt hard enough that bits of gravel are piercing her skin and her arms are flung wide to either side and her hair strung out on the road in wisps of mousy brown. She is wearing a suit that was white at some point but has been covered with dirt and grit and all sorts of other horrid little things, like wear and tear and smudges of blood, snips and snails and puppy-dog tails. She’s disgusting; there is nothing about her that warrants attention to this degree, the warm hands on the sides of her face and the quiet swearing, the two pairs of eyes staring at her with apprehension. There is the woman, the one like the sun, and she’s got her blonde hair tacked up behind her head and eyes the same color as the sea and the noonday light wreathed around her head, turning her to shadow. Next to her there is a little boy. Vanya sees them for a moment, frozen in time, and then she doesn't see anymore of anything because she passes out. 

When she wakes up she’s in a hospital and that hospital is bright white and the curtains are the color of dust and there are no shadows at all because the fluorescents burn them all away. There are doctors milling around, reeking of sanitation in that way that only doctors can, dressed up in shades of blue-green and teal; they are all big, lumbering men with clipboards and hard-set shoulders and voices like stone. They tell her that it is October 12, 1963, and that she is not dead but she went soliciting at heaven’s gates and came back worse for wear. God must really hate girl scout cookies, Vanya thinks, and then bursts into a full-bodied laugh that has whichever faceless doctor that’s prodding at her now pressing his mouth into a thin, straight line and scratching something illegible (and unkind, Vanya’s sure) down onto his piece of paper.

He leaves soon after, bumbling out the door with an air of self-importance and no skill to back it up. Vanya takes the opportunity to look around the room, slowly because her head is aching like it's about to split in two; there is a small table next to her with nothing on it, one that’s a neutral shade of beige with knobs of a shiny steel chrome. The floor is tile, mostly white with the occasional green thrown in for effect; one-two-three, white-white-green, duck-duck-goose. Vanya is very tired. The clock on the wall says that it is 5:30, and there is light shining through the curtains and onto the floor in shades of muted gold and orange and red (they’re filtered through the curtains, cut down to almost nothing by the time they reach her) so it must be 5:30 in the evening, but that means nothing to her because she doesn’t know what time it was when she got here. She can’t have been here long, right? They would have said something, right?

She asks the nurse that comes to take her vitals, but all she does is press her hand to Vanya’s arm and look at her with a sweet, cloying smile that Vanya doesn’t see because Vanya is fixated on the curls of hair that are nestled beneath her headband, the ones curved stiffly around her ears and turned up into sharp little points. You have visitors, she tells Vanya as she takes her blood pressure. She doesn’t say anything in about Vanya’s question, so Vanya contents herself instead with watching the process in a haze of detached fascination- how is it that she doesn’t know where she came from or why, but she knows that when the nurse places a black cuff around her bicep and that cuff squeezes tight, it means that she’s having her blood pressure taken? She doesn’t understand what’s happening but she  _ does  _ understand what’s happening, and that’s making her headache ten times worse. Pick a side, godammit. What’s happened to you?

You have visitors, the nurse tells her again. Do you want to see them?

Vanya nods. Why not? How can this be made worse? The nurse could say that death was waiting on the doorstep and she’d say sure, let him in, make him some tea and we’ll catch up for a little while. The nurse doesn’t say anything else at all though, just squeezes Vanya’s arm- her nails are short and filed square, her fingers cold and it’s like the blood pressure cuff all over again- and then she leaves and the next thing Vanya knows the door is creaking open again and in comes the lady who is secretly the sun and her little boy. 

That is when Vanya’s life begins. She is born in a hospital, as so many people are. She wonders if she was born in a hospital the first time. She doesn’t know; what she does know is that she is Vanya Hargreeves, and that is all that she is and all she was and all she ever will be. 

She goes home with the lady and her son, sits in the passenger's seat of an old beaten-down car that rumbles when they turn the corners and coughs up smoke at the stoplights. She learns that the woman’s name is Sissy. She learns that the little boy’s name is Harlan. She learns that she was hit by this very car, and that it happened two days ago, and that she doesn’t remember anything at all beyond her own name. That’s not half as distressing as it ought to be, Vanya thinks, because the thing about knowing your own name and nothing else is that you don’t know what you’re missing. There’s something hollow about it, yes- a curiosity that she can’t satiate, a little scoop out of her stomach that she can’t quite figure out how to fill, but as she settles into life with Sissy and Harlan and Sissy’s husband Carl she learns that she’s happy enough for now. She’s a nanny for Harlan, and she quite likes Harlan so her life is good. She’s good. She’s fine.

She has food to eat, she has a place to sleep, she has a job, an income, stability. And she has Sissy.

And Sissy, Sissy, gods above  _ Sissy.  _ Vanya learns something about herself through Sissy as the days pass on through, each one just like the last. Sissy draws her in like the sun, Sissy lights her up like a firework and Vanya’s no expert on anything, not on anything at all, but when Sissy slides her hand along her arm, when Sissy wraps a hand around her wrist and presses against the skin and bone, when Sissy leans over her shoulder close enough for Vanya to feel the rise and fall of her chest, Vanya feels like everything’s right with the world. There’s something inside of her that spikes when she’s touched, an ache in her chest that feels like ripping off a band-aid, and there’s something about the way that she finds herself so drawn to Sissy when she smiles (mouth curled up higher at one corner than the other, pretty in a way that makes Vanya hurt) that makes her wonder what it was about her life before this that was  _ so bad _ that it has her feeling like fire when someone so much as looks at her kindly. 

Sissy wraps a blanket around her shoulders when she grows cold, and Vanya’s hands shake. Sissy buys her clothes, helps her figure out what she likes and what makes her feel like she’s being run off the face of the planet. Sissy shows her how to cook one day, stands behind Vanya and takes her hand in her own, slides her thumb over the joint in Vanya’s wrist and then travels down to the knuckles, leans down to talk in Vanya’s ear as she shows her the right way to chop carrots- hold the knife at an angle, put your other hand further to the side, I don’t want you getting hurt now, we’ve got food to make- and she’s so  _ close  _ so often, close enough that when she talks Vanya can feel the hiss of her breath as it’s pushed through her teeth. 

Loving Sissy- and  _ oh  _ what a mess Vanya is, loving someone when she doesn't have the blueprint for it, and maybe that’s where the longing she feels deep inside of her sometimes comes from, the ghost of one past want or many past wants all piled on top of each other and festering away somewhere she can’t reach them- is like loving the night sky or the smell of bread as it’s baking in the oven. She can’t imagine  _ not  _ loving Sissy. But Vanya is first and foremost someone foreign to herself; what does it feel like to know your name and nothing else? What does it feel like to catch a glimpse of a stranger’s face in the spoon you use to stir your tea? What does it feel like to love for what  _ can’t  _ be the first time (there’s all sorts of love in the world and she  _ must _ have felt some sort at some point, she  _ must  _ have she  _ must  _ have), but may as well be for all that she knows?

Well don’t ask Vanya. She doesn’t know  _ anything _ , much less how she  _ feels _ . Figuring out how things feel without a lifetime of experiences to draw upon for comparison is difficult; she knows that she takes her coffee in no particular way (she’s learned that she’s not picky) and she knows that she likes her clothing loose and soft, and she knows that when she sleeps she rarely sleeps well. She knows that she enjoys spending time with Harlan and she has a good voice for reading out loud, and she knows that sometimes she mixes up her left and her right. Sometimes something inside of her twinges when the phonograph is droning on and on in the corner, but she’s decided that that her odd fixation on classical music is yet another residual emotion- something that she can’t put a name or face to as she is now, so she just won’t try.

Because when it comes down to it, even with all of her longing and mooning and wanting, Vanya thinks that she must be very happy. Sissy touches her, runs her fingers along the length of her arm or rubs a palm over her back, and Vanya is happy. Harlan plays hide-and-seek with her and has her read his favorite books out loud, and she is happy. She was hit by a car and she remembers nothing but her name, nothing of that day but a woman like the sun if the sun were infinitely closer and ten times as warm, and there is a voice inside of her that is warning her off from getting too comfortably too quickly, some deep-seated instinct (and a learned one she suspects) that says she is awful like an angel or a monster or that  _ bastard  _ who just cut you off in traffic and that she ought to go and lock herself up somewhere far, far away because she is not fit for anyone at all, but she’s not going to listen to it. She’s not, she’s not, she’s not.

Thinking like that is a vicious cycle- like the chicken or the egg, but the chicken is a bloodthirsty little beast so the egg never hatched for fear of it and that put an end to that- and Vanya is too busy loving several different people in several different ways to make the time for it. 

No, no, no, Vanya has a second chance at life and Vanya is going to take it. Vanya has learned that she is not the sort of person that likes to waste; Vanya feels a visceral sort of ache whenever she can’t finish all of her food, Vanya drinks down every last drop of her morning coffee, Vanya never lets the sink run when she’s brushing her teeth. Didn’t you hear? Vanya loves with everything that she has, because it would drive her crazy otherwise. She’s not going to waste away, oh no oh no, not her; Vanya would say that she doesn’t know anything of herself but her name, but that would be a lie. Vanya knows that she loves, knows that she is in love, Vanya knows how she takes her coffee and how she takes her tea and that she’ll drink either one of them even if they’re not made how she likes them. 

Vanya knows that her insides are all wrong and twisted, that her heart is where her stomach should be and her brain is swimming somewhere in her chest, and she knows that she’ll survive regardless. Maybe her stomach will end up near her brain- food for thought, which she’ll agonize about later until every drop of that agony is gone because she doesn’t like wasting things. Vanya knows that that is what will happen, because while Vanya knew nothing but her name after that fateful day Vanya has learned many, many things since then, like how it feels to to have a steady supply of soft clothing and how it feels to sleep in a warm bed and how it feels to hear music playing from two rooms over, faint and tinny but so, so sweet. How it feels to chop vegetables when another person’s hand is guiding your own. How it feels to chop vegetables on your own, how it feels to experience the rush of pride that comes with accomplishment. How it feels to wade through grass that comes up to your waist. How it feels to swim in the lake on a hot day. 

Most of all, she’s learned how it feels to be around people that she loves. And maybe she has no say in the matter, maybe her world will come crashing down tomorrow in three sharp bursts,  _ bang bang bang  _ and she’s dead, but maybe it won’t and she’ll be allowed to be happy. Vanya knows that she likes to be happy. She like to  _ feel  _ happy, and one of Harlan’s books has a rhyme in it once about wishing on stars,  _ starlight, starbright, first star I see tonight,  _ so sometimes Vanya goes out at night to look up at the sky and make one wish, one that comes right from her heart, wherever it may be hiding at the moment. 

She’d like to stay like this, she wishes. She’d like to stay happy. What’s happened to you? What’s happened to her? She doesn’t know, and she’d like to find out, but she’d like to stay happy too, and maybe she can’t have it all but she can certainly  _ try.  _ And Vanya is no expert on anything, not even herself, but even she can make a vow so that night when the sun goes down and the moon comes up and the stars dot the sky- looking like the freckles Sissy gets when she stays out in the sun for longer than an hour- Vanya creeps over to her window and heaves it open. Then she stands there with the cold night breeze tugging at her hair, looking out over the blue-painted hills and valleys of the farm, and she makes her nightly wish. 

She’d like to stay like this. She’d like to stay happy.

She shuts her eyes tight and pulls a deep breath in. Then she lets it out and goes back over to her bed, the wooden floor cold against her bare feet, and she climbs in and pulls the covers up and goes to sleep. Vanya is no closer to knowing where she came from but she has learned enough of who she is, so she’s done enough for now. She’s made up her mind- she’s going to stay right here, and she’s going to be happy for as long as she’s allowed and then for a little longer after that. And no one, nothing, and nobody is going to be able to stop her, no matter how hard they may try. She’s  _ sure _ of it. 

**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving a comment if you enjoyed!! I love hearing from you guys!!


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